The date: January 26, 1945. The place: Riedwihr Woods, Alsace, France.
Lt. Audie Murphy was the newly assigned commander of Company B. When the Germans attacked with over 200 soldiers and six tanks, Murphy ordered his men to withdraw into the forest. Nearby sat an American tank destroyer, knocked out of action and blazing with flames from German guns. On an impulse he never fully explained, Murphy raced to the tank destroyer, climbed aboard, and standing in full view of the enemy, opened fire with the vehicle’s machine gun. While the combat vehicle burned beneath him and German bullets and shells flew around him, the lone American blazed away with the .50 caliber, killing over a dozen enemy soldiers. That one-man stand broke up the German attack. As they retreated, a shell knocked Murphy from the vehicle, and he limped in a daze back toward his men. Behind him the flame-engulfed tank destroyer finally exploded.
For this action, Audie Murphy (1925–1971) received his nation’s highest award, the Congressional Medal of Honor. When the war ended, having received honors for his bravery in Sicily and Italy as well, Murphy returned home as America’s most highly decorated soldier.
And he was not quite 21, still too young to vote—almost, for that matter, to shave.
From Boy to Man
Read almost any account of Audie Murphy in his youth, and the description “baby face” will pop up. In training, a top sergeant nicknamed him “Baby” for his face and his slight build.
Yet only in his physical appearance did that nickname have any application. As Murphy himself later said, “I can’t ever remember being young in my life.” His father was a ne’er-do-well sharecropper who eventually deserted the family, his mother died when Audie was 16, and he himself was the seventh of 12 children. He received only a fifth-grade education before leaving school to work in the cotton fields and help support his family. When the war came, and with his younger siblings being sent to orphanages or entrusted to the care of relatives, he attempted to enlist in the Marines, but his height, weight, and age—5 feet 5 inches tall, 112 pounds, 17 years old—brought only rejection. Later, as soon as he turned 18, the Army accepted him.
Murphy spent most of the next three years in the infantry, two of them in combat. He fought first in Sicily, then in Italy, and finally in France. Again and again, he engaged the enemy, winning citations and medals for bravery along the way. The incident which affected him most during these battles was when his best friend, Lattie Tipton, died in Murphy’s arms the day the Allied forces invaded Southern France. He rose from his friend’s body, and for a few minutes he lived in what he later called a “nightmare,” wiping out two German machine gun nests in his blind fury before returning to his dead friend, where he wept unashamedly.
The Good Years and the Bad
Greeted as a hero on his return to the States, Audie Murphy seemed to live a full and prosperous life. His account of his war years, “To Hell and Back,” became a bestseller upon its publication in 1949, and from the late 1940s until 1969 he appeared in 44 feature films, most of them unremembered today. One of these, however, a movie based on his time in combat and also called “To Hell and Back,” marked an extraordinary moment in Hollywood, as Murphy played himself in the film. During this Je, he also won minor renown as a country song lyricist.
But not all was well. His boyhood and the war had left him with wounds and scars invisible to the eye. He suffered from what we today call post-traumatic stress syndrome, and just as likely, from his hard-scrabble adolescence. Off-and-on throughout the rest of his life, he slept with a pistol under his pillow. A hair-trigger temper landed him in several physical fights. He was demanding in his expectations of others, which negatively affected both of his marriages. As he aged, he gambled to excess and made unwise investments, which left him broke at the end of his life.
Yet this same man astounded book reviewers by leaving out any mention of his war decorations in “To Hell and Back.” Later, when he could have earned a good deal of much-needed money doing liquor and cigarette advertisements, he refused, unwilling to corrupt America’s youth.
Along with five others, Murphy died in a plane crash in May 1971, near Roanoke, Virginia, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
The Rough Men We’ll Always Need
To judge Audie Murphy, the man and his motives, is a near impossible task. Some of his friends thought him born in the wrong time, more suitable, say, to the code and violence of the Old West. That he was suffering from PTSD seems beyond doubt, as might be expected of any veteran who had undergone so many hard-fought battles. That he could be hard on those close to him, even cruel at times, is also well-documented.
We Americans prefer our great men and women to be saints, forgetting that they, like us, were flesh-and-blood beings subject to human folly, wrongdoing, and the circumstances of their time and place. Perhaps columnist Richard Grenier’s 1993 paraphrase of George Orwell might serve as Murphy’s memorial plaque: “When the country is in danger, the military’s mission is to wreak destruction upon the enemy. It’s a harsh and bloody business, but that’s what the military’s for. As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
Audie Murphy was one of those men.
